The year 2022 has already begun, and to occupy this cold winter day, we suggest you take a look in the rear view mirror, because this month of January and this year 2022 which is beginning are loaded with birthdays at Apple and in the computer world in general.
2022 is first of all the sixtieth anniversary of a word, which we can no longer imagine today that it could have been invented one day. This word is simply “computing”. A very French invention, contraction of the expression “automatic information”, imagined by the engineer and computer pioneer Philippe Dreyfus. English speakers continue to designate this technology by a metonym which reduces computing to its function of calculation, or “computing” in English, just as the computer is, in French, the one who orders, who puts things in order.
Speaking of computers, do you realize that it will be 40 years this year since Microsoft’s DOS system gave birth to the PC clone market, snatching the authorship of the term from IBM “Personal Computer” attached to the first personal computer in its range, launched a year earlier? Because in 1982, Microsoft had the audacity to go behind the back of the giant IBM, by offering everyone to sell computers equipped with the system it had created for this PC. By this choice, Microsoft launched the standardization of the computer market, sweeping away all its competitors in its path, leaving Apple for a long time only crumbs in the corner of a niche.
